We are committed to ensuring we have an diverse and inclusive organization and we definitely have more work to do in that area . We've just added a dedicated D&I manager on my leadership team and I'm excited to see the impact she will have on the organization in 2018. Keep sharing feedback on the progress we are making!... MoreLess

Great benefits, good work/life balance, great remote culture, competitive salaries, great potential

Cons

The engineering organization is plagued by a bad re-org that started about a year ago but has gotten progressively worse. Teams are split into “pillars” with no plan on how those teams are meant to interface across the pillars. Communication from leadership is poor leading to isolated pockets of engineering and a product that is becoming increasingly inconsistent and confusing.

Best practices and engineering standards are nonexistent as each team has freedom to do whatever they want, unchecked. Quality of leadership varies wildly from parts of the engineering organization as each pillar is responsible for its own hiring practices. On more than one occasion, hiring managers have hired their personal friends and former coworkers into roles.

The company hires only generalists as engineers. You have people who are Rails experts setting up and maintaining databases. Engineers who would prefer to work on Golang are writing Javascript. This leads to general frustration and a lower quality of work.

The remote benefits are so great that employees stay, even if they’re unhappy. DigitalOcean pays NYC salaries to people living all over the world, creating an unbeatable offer that people can’t leave. While this might seem like a pro, in reality it means you have a large number of disgruntled employees that feel stuck.

Middle management is increasing at a rapid pace. A large majority of the new management/leadership is being hired externally, with a few very rare exceptions for internal promotion. There’s little opportunity to grow with the company as an engineer. The career promotion process is very poorly defined and documented and results in a lot of confusion and frustration across engineers. People are left wondering how and when they should ask for a promotion as that seems to be the only way that people get raises or promoted to new levels.

For a long period of time there was no CTO, then there was a CTO for just under a year who worked outside of the main office and never spoke to engineers, even when the engineering organization was still relatively small. She’s since left, leaving the organization with no C-level technical leadership. With the increase in middle management and a lack of technical vision/leadership it feels increasingly isolating to be an individual contributor in the organization.

Advice to Management

Get rid of the poorly performing engineering leadership. Create real performance reviews to remove underperformers and incentivize individuals to perform to higher standards. Bring focus back to the point of difference, the simplicity of the platform and focus on building back trust and esteem with engineers and designers. The people you have are here because they believe in the product. There's a great opportunity here but leadership needs to be held accountable for mistakes.

Thank you for the feedback. I'm sorry your experience is not living up to the standards we're setting for ourselves.

We are an agile organization and as such we practice real-time, continuous feedback. The research in the area overwhelming shows that its a much better and healthier way to let employees know how they are performing in a fashion that helps them address gaps quickly and continuously improve and develop. And we have multiple formal check-ins per year where you and your manager should be sitting down and having clear and candid conversations about exactly what's working and what's not. Every single employee at DO deserves to know where they stand and where they are going.

If you're not getting that from your manager, ask him or her directly for that feedback, and if you're still confused about what that means to you, please come to me directly and I'll make sure you get what you need. We have a very high bar for performance at DO and the expectation is that you are always motivated and incentivized to achieve your best as a matter of course. If something is missing in that equation please let us know what that is so we can help.

I appreciate your comments about ensuring we keep focus on simplicity of the platform and power of the product. Please continue to keep us honest and hold us accountable for making sure we keep that focus top of mind for everyone.... MoreLess